Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Bolton Hall, The New Thrift (New York: Huebsch, 1923), 108. 2. Ibid., 108–9. 3. Lyman Beecher Stowe, “Training City Boys for Country Life,” Outlook, Nov. 9, 1912, 537. 4. Michael Kazin identifies a “producerist” tradition in The Populist Persuasion (New York: Basic Books, 1995). John L. Thomas uses the term to frame the ideas of Henry George, Edward Bellamy, and Henry Demarest Lloyd in Alternative America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). Most comprehensively, Christopher Lasch writes of an ongoing radical, non-Marxist producerist tradition in The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: Norton, 1991). 5. Clipping, New York World, Mar. 14, 1926, Bolton Hall letters, box 2, Bolton Hall papers, New York Public Library. 6. William Ellsworth Smythe, City Homes on Country Lanes: Philosophy and Practice of the Home-in-a-Garden (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 56. 7. Fred Myrtle, “The Little Lander’s Hired Man: Electricity Will Do the Drudgery in Densely-Peopled Garden Cities,” Little Landers in America, Mar. 1916, 94. 8. Louis Hacker, “Plowing the Farmer Under,” Harper’s, June 1934, 69. Actually, the article reads “little Acadias,” but this appears to be a misprint. 9. Russell Lord and Paul H. Johnstone, A Place on Earth: A Critical Appraisal of Subsistence Homesteads (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1942), 184. 10. Free America, Jan. 1939, 9. 11. John Shuttleworth, “Why the Magazine Was Founded, What It Has Accomplished during the First Ten Years, and What It Expects to Do during the Next Decade,” Mother Earth News, Nov./Dec. 1979, 44. 12. John Shuttleworth, “The Plowboy Interview,” Mother Earth News, Mar./Apr. 1970, 6. 13. Gove Hambidge, Enchanted Acre: Adventures in Backyard Farming (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1935), 5–6. 239 14. Smythe, City Homes on Country Lanes, 59. 15. Paul Conkin, Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal Community Programs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1959), 36. 16. Sociologist Jeffrey Jacob provides the textbook definition: “large-scale collective behavior directed toward promoting or resisting social change, requiring some organizational structure, well developed ideologies, and an intellectual vanguard with recognizable public identities” (New Pioneers: The Back to the Land Movement and the Search for a Sustainable Future [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997], 5). 17. Stanford J. Layton, To No Privileged Class: The Rationalization of Homesteading and Rural Life in the Early Twentieth-Century American West (Salt Lake City, UT: Brigham Young University, 1988), 37; Terry Allan Simmons, “But We Must Cultivate Our Garden: Twentieth Century Pioneering in Rural British Columbia” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1979), 7. 18. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 419. 19. Shuttleworth, “Why the Magazine Was Founded,” 42. 20. Lena Walters to David Grayson, 1906, box 1, file 1, David Grayson papers, Special Collections, Jones Library, Amherst, MA. 21. Smythe, City Homes on Country Lanes, 184–86. Laura Lovett discusses the pronatalist implications of the arguments of Smythe and some of his colleagues (Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890–1938 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2007]). 22. Qtd. in Mary Lou Pozzo, Founding Sisters: Life Stories of Tujunga’s Early Women Pioneers (Tujunga, CA: Zinnia Press, 2005), 261. 23. David Danbom, “Romantic Agrarianism in Twentieth-Century America,” Agricultural History 65, no. 4 (1991): 1–12. 24. David Shi, The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), esp. chaps. 8 and 9. 25. Gould suggests that back-to-the-landers have consistently embraced three goals: the sacralization of nature, the making of the self, and the expression of resistance to the dominant culture (At Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005], 113). 26. Jacob, New Pioneers, 180. 27. This assessment depends in part, of course, on which books and articles are judged to be part of the “back-to-the-land” discourse. My own study includes a number of popular and ephemeral texts that have not been examined carefully in the past, and on my own list of “canonical” back-to-the-land books and articles there are very few in the first half of the century that feature romantic reveries about nature. 28. Truman A. DeWeese, The Bend in the Road, and How a Man of the City Found It (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1913), 9. 29. B. Touchstone Hardaway advocated following Thoreau’s advice...